Saturday, February 6, 2010

Artistic goings on.

First of all, I’d like to announce that the lack of artistic productivity has hit a new low. More time’s been spent repotting plants (a tale of woe in and of itself; one of the two still-surviving seed-grown African violets from last year is in serious trouble, and hoya’s got what I suspect is a fungus) then making things, which is sad.

One thing that was scribbled can be seen above. The bucket of birds. The concept of the bucket appeals to me for many reasons, most of which go along these lines: buckets are meant to carry things en masse, and birds are a good thing. Kind of like bucket of sugar. Or bucket of cash. Except both can be found in nature. Birds tend to not sit still, when one tries to stuff them into a confined space, and considering that they have an escape hatch right over their heads… well.

Long story short, this post is not going to be about artfulness, with one exception. The monthly meeting of Art Grrls is happening this upcoming Thursday, and I’m looking forward to it. The meeting is basically a very loosely connected group of female artists in the region, and serves a networking function, along with the “eat, drink and be merry” function.

Myself and one other girl, who is in her late 20s, are among the youngest. The oldest are in their 70s, if not 80s. (I don’t ask. It’s not polite to ask. Nevermind why.) It’s a cheerful bunch, with plenty of art-related experience and entertaining life stories to share. One of the high points of the gathering is the fact that we tend to go to rather nice restaurants for this. (Last one was at Wildflour, a bakery-cum-fine dining ‘experience’, or a charming little house in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. Yummy pot-stickers, though.)

Nonartistic goings on.

A few lines of wisdom from the local Elrin.

(After watching a movie) “... Why did I try to pause Wikipedia?”

(Upon reading a thread about children on Straight Dope) “Sex is not recreation. Frisbee is.”Link of the week.

There are very few blogs that I follow with any consistency (read: 1), as the blogosphere is a giant timesink, and one should recognize it as such. Time sinking in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad. Spending time on the computer when you’ve got other errands to take care of is. Can’t dispute the basic contradiction there.

This blog was found while idly searching for the level of daily alcohol intake, which signifies that you are an alcoholic. (The answer is unclear, though most guys can get away with about 3 beers a day. And still stay healthy.)

Last speaker of Aka-Bo, a Great Andamanese language, died earlier this week. (This group of languages was practiced by people from a chain of islands east of India; it is, as a whole, mostly extinct). While poking about the interwebs and searching for information about these people, I came across this little blurb:

The Sentinelese is a group of people inhabiting a little island slightly off the main chain of Andaman islands. They are also among the most socially isolated people on the planet. Meaning, that they react violently towards outsiders, and because their tiny island (72 square kilometers) likely doesn’t have much in the way of natural resources, the rest of the world lets them be. (Likely, if the rest of the world didn’t let them be, they’d die off from foreign diseases.)

Still, their state boggles my mind to an extreme degree. Virtually nothing’s known about their language, though it’s presumed to be some form of Andamanese. Virtually nothing is known about their culture. They’re just.. out there. Little groups of people (only rough approximations of their total numbers have been made, since one can’t really knock on their doors to take a census) are living on an island, in the middle of an ocean. They do not know that there’s the rest of the world out there. Hell, they likely do not know that the world is round. They assault helicopters with arrows, and succeed in driving the said helicopters off.

What do they think of the rest of the world? Of the people who occasionally cross their boundaries? What do they think of the massive ships which were wrecked by their island? (One of these ships is still visible north-west of the isle, if you look Sentinel island up on Google maps, by the way. A wreck in a deep-blue sea.)